English Challenges

This is my last entry in this blog because I doubt I’ll keep using this at some point of my life and in this blog I’m going to talk about my english language challenges during this semester. To be honest the most difficult thing to do was going to class because I live so far away from Uni that sometimes I couldn’t make it in time and I was afraid to interrupt the class, but besides that, I think I’m good, I mean I already knew English stuff, I think I can write it and understand it in a good way but I can’t pronounce it, but I think that’s just practice? Because I don’t speak English in my daily rutine but I listen a lot of English music and I read a lot of stuff written on English and maybe that’s why I can write it and understand it and not speak it, because I haven’t development that ability. The blogs were fine, I mean I got a little bored talking about my career in most of the post but I enjoy it and it was easy to me? Well. My experience in Uni was fine, I made all the tasks and I tried to assist on a weekly basis to class, I think it’s good we can learn here English because it’s really helpful when you are in Uni because you have to write emails in English or read papers in English and it’s a great opportunity. I was lucky that I grew up in an environment where English music and movies in English were important so this class wasn’t really difficult to me because I already knew some stuff. Nowadays English is really important to me because 99% of the music that I like is in English and I’m a big fan of meeting the bands when they came to Chile so obviously I need to know English because I need to interact with them, also I use it to my career, I need to read investigations in English or watch some documentaries and it is really helpful to understand English language when you can’t find subtitles, so I’m grateful for this uni course because I learned knew words and better ways to say things. 

Changes in my study program

So like I’ve said in my previous posts, I’m studying psychology. I’m in my third year, in 2018 I’ll be (hopefully) in my fourth year so I’m going to talk about changes I’ll do until this point of my career because that’s what I’ve experienced so far. I really like the curriculum because you have a lot of social course and a bunch of “biologic” courses too but I don’t think we have enough “practical” courses because until third year you have one or two classes with practical activities but almost every course is theoric and I’m afraid that my fourth year is going to be like “hey this is a real person with real problems I know you haven’t had the opportunity to ‘practice’ everything you know but now help this person”. About the workload, the first two years were terrible but I’m not sure if my experience was bad because I have a poor timing to do thing and I don’t know how schedule stuff or in reality we had a lot of things to do. Well, about the faculty facilities, as you can see we barely have classrooms, some semesters to have class we had to use classrooms in another faculties, and you see the new building but it is only to post graduate students, so we keep being 80 students in classrooms for 30 students. About the use of technology, the only time I can use a computer in the Uni is in English class, because this faculty has so many students that spaces like library or computation rooms are always full of people so you can’t really use one unless you have a lot of patience. I don’t really have comments about the teaching methods because I’m aware that every professor has their own way to teach stuff according to the field they are working for, and if I had comments probably the faculty wouldn’t listen because in some past semesters my generation had some problems with some teachers or the students that assist those teachers and never listen to us. Anyways as you can see I have a lot of say about the changes in my program but I swear I don’t complain because I never thought I’ll be attending to Uni when I was younger so I’m kinda grateful for the opportunity but that doesn’t quit that we need better things to study.

Summer Holidays

In this post I’m going to talk about my summer holidays. I don’t really have plans because I don’t like to go out a lot in summer because I hate the summer, I hate the heat waves, I hate the hot air and I don’t tolerate the sun, like… when you’re cold, cool just put gloves and a jacket on and you’re okay, but what do you can do when it’s 35°C outside? RIP YOUR SKING OFF?? But I think I’m going to Valle del Elqui. I’m not going in a “vacations mood” because that’s where I live or used to live (I’m not sure because I spent more time in Santiago) so I know all the places like I know the back of my hand and that’s all. Like every year probably I’ll go with my family and there we are going to the beach in La Serena o Coquimbo or maybe to the little towns in the way to the Argentina and Chile frontier. We don’t do that much because we are so used to Valle del Elqui, I think we already know everything there? But maybe this year we are going  to Vallenar  or maybe to Salamanca because my grandparents bought a house there so we need to go there to know the place. To be honest I don’t know what I’m going to do because this is the first year that I’m not stuck in Uni until January because a strike so I have a lot of free time and I just wanna sleep and watch Tv shows all day. Anyways, if any of you is going to Valle del Elqui, I promise is not boring and there's a lot of activities to do, like going to the observatories, or going to the little beaches in Coquimbo or La Serena, or going in a roadtrip to Argentina, knowing a lot of little towns there, it's just I've been there for twenty years and I can't think to anything new to do.

Free Post: My pet

This is my first free post of the semester so I don’t really know what to say so I’m going to talk about my pet. My pet is a hedgehog that I adopted in March of this year; I adopted her because her previous owner wouldn’t care about her and left her alone for days so it was given to me by my family – my cousin rescued her and left her at my home-. Her name is Neptuna and according to the vet, she has one and a half or two years; When she arrived I didn’t have anything to care of her and I didn’t know anything about her too, so my mom helped me to buy everything and I found a special veterinary for hedgehogs. She is still afraid of people and she doesn’t like to get touched, so she gets really defensive when someone (that isn’t me) tries to grab her but she is cute. She is small and had a family of stuffed hedgehogs to keep her company, she likes to bite mint and eat dissected worms. At first she didn’t let me sleep because she was running in her wheel all the night but nowadays I’m used to all her noises and everything is easier. Neptuna is really important to me because she arrived when my cat, my favorite cat, died and I promised I’ll never had another pet because of that so she slowly made me change my mind. I attach pics so you can meet Neptuna.

Post Graduate Studies

So, in this post I’m going to talk about possible post graduate studies. Like I said in my latest post, I’m not sure what I’m going to do when I’m done studying psychology but something that I really like is art. And I would like to mix, somehow, what I’m studying with Art, gladly I think that could be possible because this University has a post graduate program in Faculty of Arts about Art Therapy. I have seen the program and is really cool, it only lasts two years and I think I qualify for admission because its requirements are: 1.- have studied something in arts, health care or education field, 2.- have two specific Psychology courses approved (which I have) and 3.- reading comprehension in English. I think that is my best option if I don’t want to throw away my Psychology title. And if I can’t do that, I would like to be an Art teacher, but I haven’t seen programs yet so I don’t know where I would like to study. I would be safer if I study something art related after studying Psychology because a lot of people consider “art” like a waste and not a real career, so probably I would be cool saying “yeah I’m studying something art related but hey this is my second career, I’m a psychologist too”. And of course I would like to try to travel around the world to specialize because I think Chile needs more “I love arts” culture so I’m not sure I’m going to have a lot of options here. I don’t really care if I have to study online or go to class but I would like to go to class because I’m sure I won’t be efficient with online class.

My future job

Like I said in my latest post, I’m a psychology student, so you will think that I’m going to be a psychologist in a few years, but actually I don’t know? I don’t have something like “when I finish Uni I would like to do this and that”. Actually I want to do a Masters Degree in art therapy because I love art, even my second option when I did PSU was being an art teacher and my third option was architect, so I always wanted to do something art related. I’m not sure If I will be a psychologist, like the stereotype of Psychologist at some point because I’m still not sure about what I want to do, sometimes I joke about finishing Uni but ending up with a tattoo parlor doing tattoos and my diploma hanging in the wall. If I end up working in the psychology field I would like to work with young people, like teens and kid because I know there are a lot of them who need help somehow and mental health in schools is not enough, I want to help those kids because I don’t like watching tv and seeing headlines like “kid commits suicide because bullying, nobody saw the signs”. I know I’m one person and I won’t make a big difference but If I can help one person in my entire life, I’ll be more than okay with that. I don't know how but I'll like to travel a lot in my future job, maybe go to forums or adquire experience in another places. I would like to put the "therapy" space outdoors too, but i don't know how because "therapy" requires a "intimate" space with people because they let out a lot of problems, pains, secrets. And lastly, I don't like to talk about money, I don't care about the salary a lot, if it's enough to live and give myself some gifts monthly, then it is okay. 

About my career

I'm going to write about my career. So, I'm in my 6th semester at Uni, or my 3rd year and I'm studying psychology. My career (at least in this University) has 5 areas where you can get your specialization: Juridic Psychology, Educational Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Social / Communitary Psychology and Industrial / Organizational Psychology. I'm still not sure about what I'm going to do in the next two years and the only thing I know is I like Clinic and Juridic Psychology. I used to love Educational Psychology (along with the areas I like right now) and I used to get the best grades in those subjects but last semester I had a really bad experience with a class in that field (It wasn't what I thought it would be) and I decided to focus on the others. Right now I'm doing courses in the lane of Clinic and Juridic psychology and I like it a lot, and somehow this semester is a lot more "chill" than other semesters, I do not know if it is because I like what I'm doing and I'm choosing which courses to take or this semester is' chill' really. In case you do not know, Clinic Psychology and Mental Health is the area where you can find the people who works at hospitals and organizations, is the stereotype of a "psychologist" and Juridic Psychology is the field which works along with Laws to make interventions in that area. Those two areas are the lanes that I want to follow, but I'm still not sure how. Anyways, back to my career, in this University, the professional formation is like a mix of everything, like you can find courses with biologic sciences or courses that are more reflexive like psychoanalysis, and the main idea of having a lot of questions that you can choose to learn to investigate, diagnose, intervene and evaluate in different ways and in different contexts and I think that's cool.

Best Movie (on my opinion)

To be honest, I don't watch too many movies (once, a friend made a to-do watch list and I'm still trying to finish that list, I'm 70% done with it by the way) because I can't focus in something for whole two hours and I get really nervous when I can foresee that something bad is going to happen. But to me, the best movie is Dunkirk. Dunkirk is a 2017 war film about the evacuation of Dunkirk in the World War II. Like I said, I'm not really into movies, less if they are about war but the effects in this movie, the storyline, the way the movie is constructed is really cool, like they have three main scenarios and the movie focus on the way that those three scenarios converge. I don't really want to give more details in the movie because I feel like everything in this movie is important so if I start to to tell my favorite scenes or more details in the storyline i'm going to post spoilers and i don't like to do that. BUT something important about this movie is that the director is Christopher Nolan - I know he is important because my friend who gave me the to do watch list gave me like a whole page of his movies and said that his movies always were like above 90% in Rotten Tomatoes- and the whole cast is important too, i heard that a lot of the actors in Dunkirk were in other movies of Nolan. Also, this movie is important because is about survival and not blood, and the way they portrayed that is really cool because even veterans of the Dunkirk evacuation made a lot of good commentaries about this movie.

Disclaimer: I don't think this is my favorite movie, but I think it's the best movie I ever seen. I watched it like 8 times and everytime I saw it I discovered something new in the movie.

The best concert I've had

The best concert I've had took place in August 6th, 2015. I was going to see The Maine in Teatro Cariola. The Maine are an American pop punk band and they are really famous in North America, Europe and Asia but sadly there are not well-known here so the concert was really small with a few people. The Maine are an Arizona based band but they are always travelling because they love to tour (they even made a free tour for their fans in which you could see them for free).

The maine also came to Chile in 2011, when i was 15 years old and it was really special to me because they were (and are until this moment) my favorite band ever and also my first concert in front row (I was literally centimetres away from them). 

So when they came in 2015 I remember that they said that every fan who got to the avenue early was going to get a 'meet and greet' which is a space before the concert where you get to meet the band members and you can talk to them but that day I had a test at Uni and it was my first semester there so it was important to me have a good grade so I talked to my friend so she could queue for me. Long short story: I finished my test really quick, i ran to the avenue and i got to meet them. I got front row too and I got to sing my favorites songs. Like i said, there were few people so weren't a lot of screaming girls and nothing like that, so I enjoyed the concert because it was really chill. I think it was one of the best days of my life because i was seeing my favorite band in the world and I got to meet them and talk to them (of course I got really nervous and I struggled with my English because they asked me how I was and I didn't know how to say I was really happy without crying).

But, the best memorie I have about it is the next day, August 7th, because my friend who queued for me, got to know the hotel where they were staying, so we went there and they are going out to eat something in a Burger King so they saw us and called us to came there and took pictures with us (and they signed those pictures because they were polaroids pictures) and asked how the concert was and everything was really really amazing.

                             

The country I would like to visit

So. the country I would like to visit is The Netherlands. This country is also known informally as Holland and is in Europe, especifically in Western Europe. The reason I would like to go there isn't a deep reason or anything like that, is just because i'm really into art, I draw and I paint a lot, and I have a lot of painters who were born or lived there. Even thought I don't know a lot about this country besides what art books say about it, I really want to save money and go there, I even took online classes to learn Dutch. There I would like to go into art routes, take tours where you can visit homes or tombs of painters or even see where a lot of paintings took place. My favorite place to visit though, probably will be the Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, because he is my favorite painter ever (seriously, I have like 12+ books about him and even my room is decorated with his paintings) and because besides this big building where the museum is, there's a sunflowers' labyrinth which is absolutely stunning.  

I'm not really sure about in what circumstances i would like to go there, probably to visit because even though I love the country, I really want to live in Iceland, but i don't discard to go to study there because I would love to but probably I won't study something in the Psychology field because I'm not sure who Psychology programs work there and the temptation of study something art-related will be too much to don't do it. 

To sum up, I would like to go to this country because a lot of painters I admire like Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Gestel, or even Monet lived there and is important to me to go there. 

                                

This is a picture of the sunflowers labyrinth in the entrance of Vincent Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam

                               
And this one is a picture of Amsterdam, probably where the 'Starry Night over the Rhone' by Vincent Van Gogh took place (or at least was used as an inspiration)